VI
The Rectory was a red house standing in a garden, which its inhabitants, one and all, energetically declared not to be damp; from which the stranger might gather that they were not so certain on the subject as it would be well to be. Its doors were quite level with the ground, so that you walked in, without the interval even of a step to raise you above the drippings of the rain: and as the drawing-room windows also opened down to the ground, it was rather a trying business in wet weather, and kept both the housemaid and the family much on the alert. The two girls went in through the open window, for the afternoon was quite bright and fair, and no fear of rain: but they found nobody in the drawing-room, which was low and rather dark, notwithstanding those two good-sized French windows, which somehow seemed to keep the light within themselves, and did not distribute it to the further side of the drab-coloured wall; this, unornamented with pictures or any variety, afforded a dingy background for the somewhat dingy couches and easy-chairs, which were covered with brownish chintz, intended to keep clean, or in franker language, ‘not to show the dirt’ for as long a period as possible. Chintzes and wall papers, and even dresses, which were calculated not to show the dirt, were very popular at the time Mrs. Plowden married, as means of economy, and her daughters had been brought up in that tenet of faith. Accordingly everything in the room was more or less of this dingy drab complexion, which was not exhilarating to the spirits. There were signs that the room had been recently occupied by the untidiness of the loose cover of one of the sofas, which bore evident signs that some one had been lying there, and had jumped up hastily, and apparently fled, since the old novel he or she had been reading lay open on its face on the floor, and the antimacassars with which the sofa had been adorned were huddled up in limp bundles, and lay here and there where restless shoulders or limbs had left them. Florence gave her cousin a look as she picked up the book and spread out the forlorn adornments on the arm and back of the sofa. ‘They were put on quite fresh two days ago, and look at them!’ said poor Florry; they were chiefly in crochet, and the work of her own hands.
‘He has been here,’ she said, ‘and papa has called him to see if he was at work. Papa might just as well let it alone, for he is never at work; but that is what they will not learn,’ said Florence, impatient of the blindness of her parents. ‘We,’ she added, ‘have to put the room tidy after him a dozen times a day; but I prefer him to be in the drawing-room, for at least he can’t smoke here——’
‘If he is out,’ said Mab, ‘let us go, Florry: we have lost half the afternoon already.’
‘I don’t believe he is out—he is being “jawed,” as he calls it, in papa’s study: don’t you hear them? Papa is at it hot! and what good will it do? He will only say the same thing over and over—I could say it all myself off by heart, everything papa says—and, of course, so could Jim, and what good can that do? Come and stop it, Mab. Jim will be so thankful to you: and poor papa won’t be sorry either,’ Florence said, with a more sympathetic perception, ‘for he knows it’s useless; but when he once begins he can’t stop himself.’
‘Oh,’ said Mab, ‘I can’t go and disturb Uncle James.’
‘When he’ll be so thankful to be disturbed!’ said Florry, ‘and you much better than me, for you will have the air of not knowing what it all means. No; don’t go to the study door. Go round by the garden, to the window where he can see you coming. Walk slowly, and make a little noise to attract their attention, so that you may not take them unawares. You might ring, or whistle, or something—or call to Dash—and then papa would see you, and have time to make up a face.’
These domestic diplomacies were unknown to Mab, but she took to them with the natural instinct of femininity. There was a certain element of fun, too, in stopping what she still called ‘a scolding,’ and in getting the culprit off—even though the culprit did not commend himself very warmly to her partiality. She carried out the programme accordingly, while Florence waited just out of sight of the study window. It was not a French window like those in the drawing-room, and it looked out upon the dullest portion of the surroundings—a bit of grass where the water lay treacherous during the long winter months in the slight concave of the ground, with shrubs cruelly green and unchanging around it, and a dead wall which they only partially veiled behind. Mab began to call Dash loudly as she walked round the corner to this sanctuary, scattering the gravel with her feet.
The scene that might have been seen inside the Rector’s window at that moment was this: a tall youth seated on a chair presenting nothing more responsive than the crown of his head, supported on his hands, to his father’s remarks, and saying never a word; while the Rector, who had risen from his own seat at his writing-table in his impatience, stood pouring out the vials of his wrath. He was putting before Jim all the enormities of which he had been guilty—his debts, the expense he had been to his parents, the disappointment, the disgrace. When, however, Mr. Plowden held up his hands to heaven and earth in grief and disappointment that it should be ‘my son’ who had been sent down by his college, it is to be feared that Jim was making angry comments in his mind to the effect that all his father cared for was that—‘not me, or anything about me.’ He knew the circumstances very well—far better than his father could tell him; and was it likely his conscience would be more tender for being dragged over the same ground again and again? When the Rector cried, ‘What is the use of talking to an impenitent cub like you?’ his son felt deeply inclined to reply, ‘There is none.’ He had, indeed, been wound up to the pitch of saying, ‘Why do you go on like that when you’re so sure it will make no difference?’—a profoundly sensible utterance, but one, perhaps, which it does still less good to say.
When ‘Dash, Dash! come here, old fellow—get ready to come out for a walk,’ sounded into the study, that home of anything but retired leisure, the Rector came to a sudden stop. ‘There’s some confounded visitor or other,’ he said in vexation, but not without relief.